Escaping from his North Carolina home after his father murders their family and commits suicide, Trevor McGee returns to confront the past, and finds himself haunted by the same demons that drove his father to insanity. Reprint. K. AB.

Product Description

From Publishers Weekly

Brite ( Lost Souls ) comes into her own in this second novel that should establish her as not only an adept in the horror genre, but also as a singularly talented chronicler of her generation. Five-year-old Trevor McGee wakes one morning to find that his father, cartoonist Bobby McGee, has murdered his mother and younger brother, then hanged himself. Twenty years later, Trevor, now a cartoonist himself, returns to Missing Mile, N.C. (a fictional town also featured in Lost Souls ), and the now-haunted house of his youth for answers: Why did his father choose to spare his life? What prompted the loss of creativity which Trevor himself now dreads? Meanwhile, 19-year-old Zachary Bosch, himself the tormented result of disturbed parents, arrives in Missing Mile on the lam for computer hacking. The two fall in love, and, with Zach's help, Trevor finds that he can reach the horrible but liberating truth the house holds for him. Though subplots and secondary characters sometimes hamper the pace of the main plot line, they do serve to evoke a certain 20-something, cyberpunk-era zeitgeist that resonates with the concerns of contemporary youth. Author tour. Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Library Journal

Zach and Trevor are young men who fall in love in a haunted house where Trevor's father murdered his family and killed himself, sparing only Trevor. An underground cartoonist like his dead father, Trevor has returned to the crumbling house in rural Missing Mile, North Carolina, to learn why his father spared him. Zach is a hacker on the run. He is a popular and exotic extrovert while Trevor is a painfully introverted virgin. With the help of Zach and psilocybin, Trevor confronts his father in Birdland, the comic town that his father created, even as the FBI traces Zach to Missing Mile. Drawing Blood is a flawed but compelling story. It's labeled "psychological horror," but the horror gives way to a suspenseful, offbeat gay romance. The first half, where Brite's powerful characterizations and settings are drawn, is hard to put down. But the haunted house is tame, and Trevor's struggle to learn to love Zach lingers overlong in homoerotic material, straining the momentum. The FBI arrives in time, however, to lend some suspense to the ending. Recommended for public libraries.- Robert C. Moore, DuPont Merck Pharmaceutical Co. Information Svcs., North Billerica, Mass.Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Most helpful customer reviews

Somewhere near the end of this book, I decided it was the best story I've ever read. I actually did like it to this extent and I highly recommend this book to all the young gays out there who wouldn't mind a little bit of gore and some exaggerated mentions of drug use, filthiness and death.

Although many of you would think of "Drawing Blood" as a horror book, I found the highlight of its plot being the love story between the two protagonists Trevor McGee and Zachary Bosch, the two cross paths in the town of Missing Mile, NC. Each with a different past and different reasons that, however, brought them to this same place. A place Trevor is no new-comer to. He is back in the hope of finding answers to what happened in that house on Violin Road twenty years ago when his father Robert McGee murdered his wife and younger son before he committed suicide leaving Trevor as the sole cast-off of the bloodily obliterated McGee family . Zach is a nineteen-year-old computer-hacking daredevil who had escaped from his abusive parents at age fourteen and ends up on the run from Secret Services agents for all the illegal hacking and on-line thievery he'd been pulling for years with impunity. Shortly after Trevor and Zach meet, they decide to stay in that very house on Violin Road where the murders had occurred. Eventually, the house turns out to be haunted and hazardous for both of them which hardly hinders Trevor from his questing for the truth.Read more ›

I stumbled across this book like some people stumble upon Christ or Buddah. It was there at the right time just when I needed it. The first thing that caught my eye as I scanned the cover was the relationship between Zack and Trevor. Being a closeted and confused 19 year old I knew I could buy it with out looking "gay". When I got it home I started reading it and didnt put it down until I was finished. It felt like Poppy had gotten right inside that corner of my head I thought only I knew about. The feeling of loss, love, madness, disconecction. It wasn't just the gay aspect either. Trevors struggle with his ghost of a father, Zacks inability really to connect with the world except through hacking, Parker, Birdland, comics, it's all here. It's the first book I ever read that made you feel like it came with it's own Jazz soundtrack.(I later read Poppy's Lost Souls..it introduced me to the Cure) It's also the only book I've ever read that takes you into a cartoon underworld. (Litterly!!) When I was done I knew beyond all shadows I would make it..and that their was someone out there waiting and looking for me. Buy this book..give it away as gifts..hell, give it away on the street corner. Magic..pure one hundred perecent hit you in the soul magic.

This was the first book I read by Poppy and while I wa simpressed with the angst the whole twinks having sex and their tight, sinuous, slightly androgynous forms wore on after awhile. I think that there's a pandering going on. A pandering of sexuality by women of a certain ilk who think this is merely all there is to it. These effete, creative, deeply tortured pretty boys. It actually makes me wonder if the women who write like this have been virulently attacked by teh thoughtforms of such work as Cosmopolitan because it is a direct transfer of such thinking. If you're tired of hearing about waif-esque qomen who are tortured and live lives where love is something they dimly consider inbetween being beautiful and blessed, then this book rocks for you. It also comes off as more pedophiliac soft porn than erotica. I imagine a guy in his late thirties or forties buying these books and getting the latest copy of Britney Spears videos and LIE, the DVD to really sugar his jellybeans.Writing was atmospheric, the plot though---destroyed by the constant necessity to deride itself into kudzu, kudzu, kudzu, which ultimately is pablum. Again I believe she has potential, when she stops writing tripe and goes for a literature over this gothic--going nowhere foolishness, she may explode as a writer of value. I see why she credits drinking to her writing and how sobriety may mean a dry spell. A look at some of this work as a whole sober could stop a writer writing for awhile.

I first read Drawing Blood when I was in high school, and I remember loving it back then. Here it is five years later, and I just purchased another copy of the book and began reading it again. I wondered if I'd still like it as much as I did in high school, and it turns out I love it even more now.I haven't gotten a damn thing done all week because I've had my nose in that book every free minute. Every time I go to sleep, the graceful, spidery, blackened words imprint themselves on my visions and haunt my dreams. I am truly absorbed.This book has some of the most gorgeous love scenes I have ever read. They are slightly different than your typical love scene, but they are delicious. I am female, so the scenes don't exactly vicariously include me, but I find a sense of strong loving beauty in them nonetheless. These kind of scenes really explore and dissect the human body inside and out, examining both emotions and anatomy in the rawest, most honest and passionate light. I find myself swooning, drowning in the descriptive prose.The whole story is captivating, and very unique. It is somewhat philisophical as well as entertaining. You'd be doing yourself a favor to engross yourself in this book. You might find it peeling away your layers and getting inside you.